Legislative Bargaining under Weighted Voting

By James M. Snyder Jr., Michael M. Ting, and Stephen Ansolabehere

American Economic Review, September 2005

Organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting. We analyze this setting using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model. Unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory, we find that each voter's expe...

Homeownership, Community Interactions, and Segregation

By Karla Hoff and Arijit Sen

American Economic Review, September 2005

We show that individuals with identical preferences and abilities can self-organize into communities with starkly different civic environments. Specifically, we consider a multi-community city where community quality depends upon residents' efforts to pre...

Crises and Capital Requirements in Banking

By Alan D. Morrison and Lucy White

American Economic Review, December 2005

We analyze a general equilibrium model in which there is both adverse selection of, and moral hazard by, banks. The regulator can screen banks prior to giving them a licence, audit them ex post to learn the success probability of their projects, and impos...

Estimating the Value of Proposal Power

By Brian Knight

American Economic Review, December 2005

This paper investigates the role of proposal power in the allocation of transportation projects across U.S. congressional districts in 1991 and 1998. The evidence supports the key qualitative prediction of legislative bargaining models: members with propo...

Inequality, Lobbying, and Resource Allocation

By Joan Esteban and Debraj Ray

American Economic Review, March 2006

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They ...

Politically Connected Firms

By Mara Faccio

American Economic Review, March 2006

Examination of firms in 47 countries shows a widespread overlap of controlling shareholders and top officers who are connected with national parliaments or governments, particularly in countries with higher levels of corruption, with barriers to foreign i...

Do Labor Issues Matter in the Determination of U.S. Trade Policy? An Empirical Reevaluation

By Xenia Matschke and Shane M. Sherlund

American Economic Review, March 2006

Some recent empirical studies, motivated by Grossman and Helpman's (1994) "protection-for-sale" model, suggest that very few factors (none of them labor related) determine trade protection. This paper reexamines the roles that labor issues play in the det...

Editors' Introduction

By Michelle DeBlasi and Ronald L. Oaxaca

American Economic Review, May 2006

Israel, the Palestinian Factions, and the Cycle of Violence

By David A. Jaeger and M. Daniele Paserman

American Economic Review, May 2006

Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism

By Alberto Abadie

American Economic Review, May 2006

Investor Sentiment and Corporate Finance: Micro and Macro

By Owen A. Lamont and Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Review, May 2006

A Letter to Ben Bernanke

By N. Gregory Mankiw

American Economic Review, May 2006

Wages and Employment in a Random Social Network with Arbitrary Degree Distribution

By Yannis M. Ioannides and Adriaan R. Soetevent

American Economic Review, May 2006

Health and Democracy

By Timothy Besley and Masayuki Kudamatsu

American Economic Review, May 2006

Democracy and Development: The Devil in the Details

By Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, May 2006

De Facto Political Power and Institutional Persistence

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2006

War and Institutions: New Evidence from Sierra Leone

By John Bellows and Edward Miguel

American Economic Review, May 2006

Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?

[Symposium: Cultural Economics]

By Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

Until recently, economists have been reluctant to rely on culture as a possible determinant of economic phenomena. Much of this reluctance stems from the very notion of culture: it is so broad and the channels through which it can enter the economic disco...

Purple America

[Symposium: Red and Blue States]

By Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James M. Snyder Jr.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

America, we are told, is a nation divided. The cartographers who draw up the maps of U.S. election results have branded a new division in American politics: Republican red versus Democratic blue. What is the source of this division? Most observers point n...

Myths and Realities of American Political Geography

[Symposium: Red and Blue States]

By Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006

The division of America into red states and blue states misleadingly suggests that states are split into two camps, but along most dimensions, like political orientation, states are on a continuum. By historical standards, the number of swing states is no...